The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  I picked out a delicate, once pale pink woman’s shoe from the bottom of the pile, the leather intensely wrinkled at the instep.

  “That one has no fellow, Miss,” the man said.

  I wondered why he kept it if it had no fellow and no one would buy it, unless he understood something good about it. I liked it. The woman who’d worn it had had a very small foot. I was sure it had been a woman and not a girl who had owned it. The foot had been plump, with tapering toes and the sole covered with scuffs as if, while dancing, she’d swept the ball of her foot on the ground over and over.

  I stroked it as if it might stir.

  “It has no fellow, Miss,” the man said again.

  “How much is it?”

  He paused. “Fifteen p.”

  I poured the coins into his oily palm and took the shoe with me.

  • • •

  When we left that place I sat with Angus while he drove, Declan clopping along before us, rump swinging between the shafts. Angus told me that when he was a small boy he’d been to Glendad Head in the north of Donegal where he said on a clear day he’d seen the Mull of Kintyre and the Scottish isles, which climbed progressively north into the Arctic Circle. He said he’d always wanted to travel to the Scottish north, the High Hebrides and the Orkneys. He’d heard that the waves of the sea so far north chimed like they were made of glass.

  “The northern light inspires fear in the stranger. Like that red sun I told you about, floating all day and night on the horizon. But further north it’s constant dark in winter, so you don’t know if you’re coming or going. Waking or sleeping. But in the summer,” he said and looked at me sidelong, “there’s no night at all. Imagine the strangeness of it! And the summer fields have a rarefied smell like violets.”

  I was drawn to the idea of a place so strange; to breakers of indifferent wind. Not a soul to know me but Angus.

  “I like the idea of day and night mixing together,” I told him.

  While Angus went on about a U-shaped valley in Donegal, I thought about how he’d compared himself to Finvarra, the Fairy King of Ulster, and me to the woman he’d kidnapped and brought into the Land of the Dead. I held strangely to that comparison. In Angus’s mind I’d leave him in September for St. Mathilde’s. But if I gave myself to his world I doubted that I could suddenly leave it to rejoin the other. I had not the evenness of spirit to get up one morning from under Angus’s body, put on my court shoes and go purposefully to the piano to play the Debussy that at this moment was faded in big pieces from my memory. Preludes like torn fabrics. It was as if I had lost a certain kind of concentration; the capacity for applied subtlety and restraint. I felt awe when I remembered the way I’d found seamless connections in the moods of the music.

  The road we were on descended into a valley of rocky, neglected fields. Angus was talking about a certain “hanging” lake, catching his breath as he spoke, holding tight to Declan’s reigns, trying to keep the horse from going down the hill too quickly. I could not concentrate on what he was saying.

  Of course the travelers had recognized me as one of their own, I thought. Being with Angus made me darker, more elemental, like bogland or arable field. I had stood on the cliffs the previous evening and let the wind torment my hair to a tangled weathered mass. Before bed at night I had stared at the comb among my things but had not picked it up. I’d fingered the knots in my hair and found a dry blade of grass woven through or a bit of woolen fluff from the bedding.

  When I’d gone out to squat in the blackness of the field, I’d liked the warm feeling of my own urine on my feet. My dress unwashed carried the odors of Angus’s body commingled with my own. My sleeves tasted of salt from sea air and sweat.

  Angus stopped the caravan at the bottom of the hill. He’d been talking to me but I hadn’t heard him.

  “Where are you now?” he asked, cupping my jaw in his hand and bringing me to face him. Even as he did this I strained my face from his and would not meet his eyes, and this unnerved and aroused him.

  I jerked my head loose of his hand. I felt my face heat. Gooseflesh rose on the skin over my neck and chest. I bit my lip to hide a smile and he grew boisterous, for he loved to see me try to stifle my reactions to him. I laughed and struggled against his advances but he called me his little colt and said, “You buck and fight, but you’ll take the bit in the end.”

  He drove the caravan onto the open field and brought me inside.

  We got quickly out of our clothes and wrestled on the bed. I was a few minutes on my back with him making love to me before he rolled us both over so I was on top. He pushed me gently up to a sitting position while he remained on his back, then held his arms up to me and I used them as leverage to move over him.

  “Look at me,” he said. But I kept my eyes to the ceiling, my body shaking with exhilaration.

  He took my jaw in his hand and tried to make me face him, but I closed my eyes. After a few minutes of rocking at the thigh I relaxed. He’d left the doors open and the daylight came in on us. The clouds had passed and the sun shone brilliantly now. Being so exposed before his eyes made me feel warm and bright, and I thought of a candle I had seen once illuminated by many candles so that the long cord of the wick could be discerned within like a backbone. I was sure that Angus saw every thrill run through my body and that he could hear the galloping of my heart as audibly as if his ear were pressed to my breastbone.

  And then the world went slow. We seemed to be swimming, the air around us heavy as water. Now I was looking in his eyes, which were clear and fixed to mine. My hands pressed against his chest; his were on my waist, the touch of them so soft it burned. We moved steadily together, rocking and lifting, riding the water now, the sensation between us building exquisitely. I squeezed my eyes shut. The rapture was drawn out and kept renewing itself like a curtain furling and unfurling and furling again and I heard myself calling out some inarticulate cry that seemed to come from outside on the field. When I opened my eyes I was shivering. The world was blasted with daylight and a sensation of amnesia.

  He was anxious, his eyes lit up; and beside himself as he still was with the desire, he did not recognize that I was confused now, overly tender. With resilient strength he lifted me off him and, rolling me onto my stomach, lifted my hips slightly and entered me from behind, something he’d never done before. I remembered Letty Grogan saying that tinkers were filthy and did it like rams and ewes in the light of day. I felt rushed with shame and cried out for him to stop. As I wrapped myself in a blanket I told him I was not a ewe or a cow. He lay down next to me and said a little defensively, “It’s not a position unusual to men and women.”

  My temples ached. I curled into the blanket, not wanting him to touch me.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, love,” he said, touching my face.

  “You didn’t hurt me!” I cried. “But I’m not an animal.”

  “I know that well, lass.” He stroked my damp hair away from my temples, but as he gazed at me, a little smile grew at the corners of his mouth and it made me hate him.

  I pushed his hand away. “I’m not an animal like you,” I said.

  He stiffened and withdrew his hand, the words passing painfully through him.

  I regretted saying it. My heart beat uneasily.

  He let out a heavy breath then turned onto his side facing away from me. I lay there waiting for my senses to come back to me, struggling to understand what it was that had just happened.

  • • •

  That afternoon while Angus slept beside me, I heard one of the Debussy Preludes, “Feuilles Mortes,” in my head. “Dead Leaves.” I sat up and pressed my hands to the blanket, trying to play it, trying to find the emotional restraint the music required, concentrating on the element of stasis in the piece.

  I thought of St. Mathilde’s. The deep silence of the studio rooms. The discipline required to rein in the heart; to isolate and set it to formal rhythm and intonation.

  How could I go back to long hours o
f striving for control and precision; a little dormitory room with a cold, clean bed and ironed sheets in which I would lie alone at night, remembering the days that Angus and I had moved from one damp embrace to the next? I wanted to tell him that this change was agonizing; that I’d not be able to reverse it.

  Under his makeshift bed was my canvas bag that held new clothes I’d bought for that other life. A linen cutwork blouse. A blue serge skirt. A box of tortoiseshell hair clips and a pin to wear on the lapel of my jacket: a rhinestone dragonfly. I imagined myself dressed in these clothes, walking onto a stage in a crowded concert hall, court shoes clicking on polished wood. I saw myself sit at the piano to play “Dead Leaves,” a hush come over the audience. But in the daydream my hands would not move on the keys and mumbled voices rose from the audience.

  A phrase of “Dead Leaves” came to me and as I played and replayed it in my memory I realized that I disliked its quiet formality. I wondered if I’d ever liked it. All the pieces of music I’d committed to memory felt suddenly random, impermanent. I could close my eyes and let the winds dilute them; drive the memory of them away like smoke. I sighed at the unexpected relief I felt, even as my eyes dampened with tears.

  I looked at Angus Kilheen beside me and my thoughts of music were eclipsed by the memory of the sex; the rapture that had threatened to take me apart. I remembered the weight of his body on my back and felt curious, letting myself imagine what it might be like.

  I leaned into him and stroked the hair away from his ear. “I’m sorry, love,” I whispered.

  Such an act only asked of me a deeper surrender, I told myself. That was all it asked. I’d relax into the confusion. I would learn to go darker, steadier. The overbrightness of the world would hurt me less.

  I turned onto my stomach, resting one side of my face on the pillow. “Angus,” I whispered again, and he stirred. I felt his breath on my neck, his hand circle my waist.

  • • •

  Angus laughed at me when I showed him the pink shoe I’d bought, but I argued that some of his beloved crockery was also useless.

  “It’s like sculpture. Something finely handcrafted. Ruined art is still art. But an old battered shoe!”

  “You like to drive away other people’s spirits from things, but I like the spirit in this shoe. I like imagining the woman who wore it out.”

  He smiled and said, “Mad as the mist and the snow.”

  I kept the shoe in my pocket, squeezing it for luck, and when I’d catch him smiling I’d snub my nose at him and his smile would spread, his teeth large and white in his sun-bronzed face.

  • • •

  That’s how things went between us. In little ways we grew easy together, foolish and affectionate.

  · 25 ·

  THE EARLY WEEKS OF SUMMER the weather was glorious strange along the ocean. Thunderheads filled to the skin with light. A shimmer over the sea. Angus laughed at me for walking about without shoes, my feet and shins filthy. At a fair I found a used cotton dress, longish, with tiny yellow and green flowers on a faded black background. It fit my form as if I’d been wearing it for years, snugly at the bodice and waist, the skirts loose and easy. I had taken to wearing it every day, letting the elements blur and soften my edges. I braided my wild, matted hair with dry bits of flower and field grass. Angus left a barrel outside wherever we camped, and we used the rainwater that gathered in it for washing.

  We were on our way south to a fair on the Dingle Peninsula near a place called Caherciveen and our plan had been to keep moving slowly south, but in a field near the coast outside the town of Kilkee we forgot the world for a while and stayed. We grew used to the place together. A fat pony behind a fence whinnied at us whenever we went by. I had taken to bringing him the skins of carrots or apples or the tops of turnips left from our meals. Angus called him Phillip Flannery after a boy he knew in Holy Ghost Orphanage.

  And every day on the path to the sea we saw the same old dour-faced man who tipped his hat at us, thin as a rake and wearing the same worn plaid shirt. I called him Father Heavey after an old priest from Immaculate Conception in Bray.

  “He’s come to spy on you in the western fields. A girl from his parish gone to the devil.”

  We slept on and off, whiling the daylight hours between love and sleep. He was wild for me, as if he wanted to fill me with children; to drive them out of his own body and into mine. As if he could not bear to be the keeper of their blind, amorphous shadows.

  Once he laced his fingers through my hair, reciting Yeats: “ ‘I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea.’ ” Those days on the field near Kilkee, he quoted Yeats at every turn. In playful, erotic moments he’d tell me half breathless, half laughing that I had “great, shapely knees” or that I was “fit spoil for a centaur.”

  But it was at night when we had little inclination for sleep that he recited the poems whole as we sat at the fire and I listened with the black of the night all around us, captivated:

  The host is riding from Knocknarea . . .

  And Niamh calling Away, come away . . .

  We’d cross the field in the dark into the little village where there were a few flaring gas jets along its main street and geese nesting along the ruin of a castle wall.

  “The moment is always departing, Mare,” he said to me one night and held my face in his hands in the middle of the vacant street.

  I had stopped sending the cards to Sister Seraphina and Mrs. O’Dare. Like the sounds of the Bach and the Chopin, their faces had begun to elude me.

  Sometimes we’d listen to the wireless, a station out of Dublin that came in and out on waves of static. I was happy to listen to reels: fiddles and pipes, but a melodious ballad or an occasional tenor in a grief-stricken song made me uneasy. I listened warily as if the sweetness of music threatened to awaken dormant memories. One night no music came in, only voices sputtering, hissing with distance. Angus toyed with wires and makeshift antennae, but could pick up nothing but crackling. “It’s dead now,” he said. “We have no music.”

  There was, that particular night, something overcast about his mood. He took out a tin whistle and played a lament, awkwardly, putting me in mind of my early struggles at the piano. I sensed that he wanted to be alone and I wandered off onto the dark field but the tune followed me, taking on a heartbreaking echo the farther I retreated from it.

  Angus was a man given to remoteness, and after the four or five days we’d spent blissful in the field at Kilkee, he was driftng from me, his eyes looking through me, fixing themselves to the horizon. I knew it was not the bit of sky or the boreen that drew him. His thoughts were back with his “ghosts,” as he’d called them; back where they must have lived before I’d arrived at his camp in the oak trees.

  Those days the light and air were permeable, the dark clouds incandescent at the seams. Cold winds brought up mineraled smells from the bogs. He made me a stranger, taken up as he was somewhere else. I was afraid to touch him.

  One night he whimpered as he slept.

  I woke at first light as he was kissing my neck. “My own love,” he whispered as his large, warm hand pressed my thighs open. He pushed himself into me and said breathily, “You’re my own love.” The anguish and intensity in him was something at a pitch that upset me even as it stirred, bringing me to a fast, unexpected rapture.

  I had a distraught feeling as he pulled away that it was not me he’d been making love to.

  • • •

  I watched his graceful figure move through the small activities of a day: the lighting of a fire; his brief wash over the rain barrel; weighting a shirt with rocks and leaving it to the wind to freshen.

  Lonely for him I committed to memory everything from The Little Book of Trees, and late one afternoon as he lay on his back on the caravan bed staring at the ceiling, I sat down beside him and whispered, “Silver Elm. Maple. Hazelnut.”

  He looked fully at me, surprised.

  “Because of their beauty, hemloc
ks are often planted as ornamentals,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Where have you been, Angus?”

  He closed his eyes. I was afraid I’d lost him again.

  I lay down on the bed next to him and asked him for a tale from the Holy Ghost Orphanage. The request made him thoughtful as he described the crumbled whitewashed walls; the noise of a crazy wind shaking the latches, creaking in the cracks of the door; the constant rain over the little island. He told me of Sister Margaret Mooney administering to a boy with consumption, little drops of blood speckling his collar and his pillow. The memories animated him. He looked into my eyes with an earnest face. “She cared for him selflessly,” he said. “That boy died and she suffered the loss of him. She suffered the loss . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “That boy, Mare,” he said. “I saw him clear as day one morning sitting in his bed. When I remembered that he was dead, he faded.”

  “Is that boy one of your ghosts, Angus?” I asked.

  “He is. The boy’s mother had brought him there. Left him. She had too many other children to care for and she said she couldn’t care for them all.”

  “Who is your other ghost, Angus?” I asked.

  He stiffened and went quiet. “Tell me something else about Sister Margaret Mooney,” I said to bring him back to me.

  He told me how once she fried bread and dusted it with sugar meant for the nuns’ tea and brought it to the boys in their beds. He spoke slowly, with a soft urgency, his eyes wide as he looked at the caravan ceiling.

  He described her eyes, dark blue and flecked with orange, magnified by her glasses; her smell of the kitchen: tea and flour and oats.

  That afternoon no wind blew at all. In the dim quiet of the caravan where we lay chastely side by side, I had the sense that his soul was ajar of him, exposed on the air around me; that I could breathe him into my lungs. I whispered, “I love her, Angus. I’m in love with Sister Margaret Mooney.”

  His face turned toward mine and I felt his breath on my temple. “Lovely girl,” he whispered. He leaned into me and kissed my hair. “Lovely, lovely girl.”